Regression (1)
Lidia de Eslend.
The eldest daughter of the renowned House Eslend in the southern Empire.
She was my childhood friend—I, the second son of House Lichtenhaus, whose head served as Chancellor of the Empire—and at the same time my betrothed, the woman I had promised to marry.
At the banquet celebrating her fourteenth birthday—or rather, after we had slipped away from it to walk together—Lidia spoke.
It was a night when the moon hung especially bright in the sky.
“Cain, sometimes I envy you.”
Cain was my nickname.
My full name was Caenderic de Lichtenhaus.
“Envy me for what?”
“You don’t know anything. Sometimes there are things in this world you’d rather not know.”
“Is that your way of calling me an idiot?”
“Yeah. That’s the part I envy.”
What did she know that I didn’t?
The insult stung less than the question that rose first in my mind. In truth, people always said I was dull and clumsy, while Lidia was forever trailed by words like prodigy and genius. Perhaps it didn’t bother me because it was simply the truth. And also because I loved her a little—just a little.
The Lidia I knew was kind by nature. Even though she was a noble born with the bluest of blue blood, she treated commoners as equals. That set her apart from me and every other noble.
What I did was show tolerance and consideration as a superior to an inferior; she truly regarded commoners as people standing on the same plane as herself. Though she belonged to a ducal house, no one suited the class system less.
Moreover, whenever the topic of beautiful women arose in social circles, her name was always among the first mentioned. Some people hurled harsh criticism at her looks, but that was only because her apparent rejection of the class system had earned their resentment. So how could any man fail to fall for her?
I was truly grateful to have been born the second son of Lichtenhaus. Had I not been, some other unworthy fellow would have claimed the place of her betrothed.
Time passed, and before I knew it I was nineteen. The clumsy little boy had grown and grown, and stood on the verge of joining the Imperial Knights. Even that owed much to my father’s influence, which only proved I was still the same unreliable, immature fellow.
“Cain, look at me for a moment.”
At the celebration for my induction, I met Lidia for the first time in a long while. I followed her footsteps and soon arrived at a deserted garden. Though winter had passed and spring had come, the late-evening air was still cool.
“Lidia, have you finished all your busy work?”
“No, not yet.”
“Then when will we marry…?”
The reason we hadn’t been able to meet was her, not me. I didn’t know exactly what kept her so occupied, but she had kept saying she was busy. As a result our wedding had been postponed again and again, and I was growing impatient.
Who could have known? That postponement would turn out to be the better option.
“Let’s call off the engagement.”
“Why…?”
“For your sake, and for mine. We can never fit together. You already know that, don’t you?”
It would be a lie to say I didn’t. I had worked tirelessly all this time to become a man worthy of her. But the moment she spoke of breaking the engagement, all of it became meaningless.
And so we went from betrothed to strangers. No—perhaps something even less than strangers. It would have been better if we had simply remained childhood friends.
The blow was great enough to shake my entire life—yet I did not despair. Instead I clenched my teeth and worked harder. If I was dull and stupid by nature, then I simply had to work that much harder. Whether Lidia would ever return was uncertain, but this was the only path left to me.
Three years later. Around the time I earned the rank of squad leader within the Imperial Knights, something that could only be called a storm struck the Empire.
The right hand of the Emperor, the Chancellor of the Empire, the head of House Lichtenhaus, had been assassinated.
He was my father.
When I received the news, I was surprisingly calm. From the start, my father, the Duke of Lichtenhaus, had never been a good father. Even my engagement to Lidia had been nothing more than a means to expand the family’s power.
When I told him of the broken engagement, I had to endure every insult imaginable. Still, I had expected at least a single tear to fall. Apparently I had resented him from the depths of my heart all along.
Separate from those personal feelings, I had to act for my father’s sake—or more precisely, to uncover the truth of his death. The Emperor had declared that the assassination of a high-ranking official, and his closest confidant no less, was a sign of rebellion.
Was this truly a rebellion? Such questions were unnecessary. In the Empire, the Emperor was the law. If he called it rebellion, even a child’s laughter could be rebellion.
As an aside, the position of family head passed to my brother, two years my senior, so I remained a squad leader in the Imperial Knights.
About a year after that, the rebellion the Emperor had spoken of so casually began to solidify into fact. Starting with my father’s death, already a double-digit number of nobles had been killed—that was the evidence.
If they shared one thing in common, it was this: they all held key positions in the Empire and were thoroughly corrupt officials. Tax evasion was the least of it; they had not hesitated to seize what commoners had built with their own hands—trash among trash. My father had been no different, which made me, as his son, deeply ashamed.
While the investigation continued, I was promoted from squad leader to platoon leader. With a double-digit number of subordinates under me, the weight of responsibility had grown considerable.
Then one day it happened. We succeeded in catching the tail of the rebel forces. On a day when the sky hung especially heavy and overcast, the Imperial Knights raided their hideout—
“Lidia, why are you here…?”
“Cain…”
In a small room deep inside the rebels’ hideout, I faced the woman I had parted from years before, the woman I still loved. In the worst possible configuration: a rebel officer and a knight of the Imperial Knights. I had hoped to meet her again, but never in a place like this.
Thud—.
I hastily shut the door. Fortunately no one had followed me, and Lidia was alone as well.
“You’ve changed a lot. You’ve become so much more of a man.”
“This isn’t the time for that. Is there a way out…?”
“There isn’t.”
“Don’t lie. Someone as clever as you would never have failed to prepare one…!”
“Then are you planning to let me go? I’ve clearly raised the banner of rebellion against the Empire.”
My thoughts ground to a halt. The cause of an Imperial Knight collided with the heart of a man who still loved the woman before him. The hand gripping my sword trembled. I didn’t want to lose either, yet the world was forcing me to choose.
“At this rate, calling off the engagement was pointless…”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m not telling. If I did, you’d just cry your eyes out for the rest of your life. No—looking at you now, it’s already too late.”
That was when it happened. Familiar voices and footsteps began to approach from outside. The rear unit must have pushed deep into the hideout. Before long they would burst into the room where Lidia and I stood.
“Cain, at least kill me with your own hands.”
“I—I can’t…”
“If I’m captured like this, I’ll die far more horribly. I’ve already committed treason, so I might as well die cleanly.”
Lidia rose from the chair. With slow steps she approached and took hold of the hand that gripped my sword. The keenly honed blade rested against her throat.
I couldn’t move. I mustn’t move. There had to be some way….
“Cain, I’m a traitor.”
“Lidia…!”
“Don’t disappoint me at the very end.”
Clang—!
Moments later the firmly shut door was violently thrown open, as if it had been kicked in.
“Sir Caenderic, the position of the advance unit is…”
“If you follow the corridor straight ahead you should find them. I will finish searching this place and catch up.”
“Understood. Then I’ll go on ahead.”
He was a platoon leader like me, though one year my senior. He led his men deeper into the hideout. Meanwhile, the red pool that had been slowly spreading finally reached my feet.
Was the last sight of me that you took into your eyes a satisfying one?
Please… please let it have been.
The raid by the Imperial Knights on the reactionaries’ hideout snuffed out the rebellion before it could ever see the light of day, consigning it to the pages of history.
Lidia de Eslend. She, too, vanished the same way. Because I had concealed her presence, her name never became fodder for gossip, yet that did not change the fact that she had been a rebel.
It was a question that haunted me. Why had Lidia raised her hand against the Empire? That she was the daughter of a ducal house only made it harder to understand.
Perhaps the answer to that question lay in my hands. Four volumes of a diary I had found in the room where we spent our final moments together. Originally they should have been submitted as crucial evidence, but I had smuggled them away.
Whether to read them or not. I had agonized over it for a full year and still had not decided. But I could no longer keep putting it off. If I was to move forward, I had to.
On a night when darkness had settled over the world, I drew the curtains across the window and lit the magic-stone lamp.
I began to read the truth I had postponed for an entire year.